‘cut flowers’ 🌷

a collage series of figures, extending on my reverence for botanicals, deepening my enquiry into the presentation of still life.
Cutting, layering, weaving; the series uses a tactile process making use of vintage source materials. These materials were deconstructed and reassembled using paper weave, chromatic collage, and crude collage.

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the weaves

a basic “under/over” weave technique takes up space across the plane. The source imagery is fragmented, rejecting the refined assembly, through a scattering pixelation across the image.
We “see through” the formal form and enter a new dimension of still life, inspired by digital pixelation, associated with obscuring or concealing, challenging our notions of formalism within still life.
For precision cuts, I use software and a slicing machine to cut the paper into planned out areas.

I must pay my respects to the original source material: a stunning book from the late 1960s “arranging flowers” by Shozo Sato, that illustrates the most vibrantly coloured flower arrangements and ikebana methods: from rikka, seika and and moribana

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chromatic collage

Ikebana arrangements are sculpture; considerations of color, line, form, and function guide the construction of a work.
The resulting forms are varied and unexpected.
The line and form of the flower arrangement is removed and replaced with large bulbous layers, leaving just a silhouetted impression of the former still life. Rather than refined lines, obtuse forms invert the original intention of the source material.
Here, I am consciously rejecting refinement and offering an arrangement that is curved, obtuse, rounded.

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crude collage

These were the most fun to make!
These physical collages are crudely cut from vintage flower arranging books; the rough cutting + sticking evokes a sense of naivety + playfulness, stripping away strict form in the source material

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